Performance of a wireless communication system can be measured, among other things, in terms of speech quality. In the current art, subjective speech quality assessment is the most reliable and commonly accepted way for evaluating the quality of speech. In subjective speech quality assessment, human listeners are used to rate the speech quality of processed speech, wherein processed speech is a transmitted speech signal which has been processed, e.g., decoded, at the receiver. This technique is subjective because it is based on the perception of the individual human. However, subjective speech quality assessment is an expensive and time consuming technique because sufficiently large number of speech samples and listeners are necessary to obtain statistically reliable results.
Objective speech quality assessment is another technique for assessing speech quality. Unlike subjective speech quality assessment, objective speech quality assessment is not based on the perception of the individual human. Objective speech quality assessment may be one of two types. The first type of objective speech quality assessment is based on known source speech. In this first type of objective speech quality assessment, a mobile station transmits a speech signal derived, e.g., encoded, from known source speech. The transmitted speech signal is received, processed and subsequently recorded. The recorded processed speech signal is compared to the known source speech using well-known speech evaluation techniques, such as Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality (PESQ), to determine speech quality. If the source speech signal is not known or transmitted speech signal was not derived from known source speech, then this first type of objective speech quality assessment cannot be utilized.
The second type of objective speech quality assessment is not based on known source speech. Most embodiments of this second type of objective speech quality assessment involve estimating source speech from processed speech, and then comparing the estimated source speech to the processed speech using well-known speech evaluation techniques. However, as distortion in the processed speech increases, the quality of the estimated source speech degrades making these embodiments of the second type of objective speech quality assessment less reliable.
Therefore, there exists a need for an objective speech quality assessment technique that does not utilize known source speech or estimated source speech.